First about this:

>Should there be a separate list for this sort of discussion?  Are we
getting
>on anyone's nerves?  I think that this is a good thing to be talking about.

I think this discussion is completely on-topic because it started when I
reported on Buzz with regard to the future design of Csound. I want Csound
to evolve into a sound processing language plugin for music production
frameworks (it can do this without ceasing to be good old command-line
Csound). I believe that I or someone else will be able to achieve this when
VST release 2 with MIDI input is released. I have a reasonable amount of
experience with musical instruments: I played the flute for years, I
overdubbed synths to make songs, I've used general MIDI to make pieces, I've
used old Moog style patchcord analogue modules (anyone ever use a Steiner
synth?), I've used other synthesis languages (Cmix). Csound is all things
considered the most flexible and powerful of the lot. Once it gets into the
regular production software (I use Emagic Logic Audio Gold myself when I'm
not writing algorithmic composition programs) it could go on and on and get
better and better; otherwise it will soon become even more marginal than it
is and something with more power will replace it. I believe the latest
version of Emagic for Windows can use VST plugins. You can use VST plugins
in Buzz via a VST effect machine. It's the closest thing to a universal
plugin standard and if in future it can transmit note data then of course it
becomes much more useful.

Then I would like to zero in on something here because I think it is
fundamental to why we talk past each other in these discussions.

Order and disorder are extremely, even categorically, fundamental ideas. It
recently has become clear that there is no simple polarity here. First, one
can generate disorder using order and some quite simple shuffling operations
(see chaotic dynamics). Second, within disorder there are many fine
distinctions. To say that humans have a proto-grammar for meter and scale is
not to say that, using this proto-grammar, it is not possible to produce
music that would pass mathematical tests for randomness. But the reverse is
not true, and this is the important point.

In other words, order is more fundamental than disorder: using order one can
generate disorder, but using disorder one cannot generate order. Once this
is grasped some over-simple distinctions between simplicity and complexity
in music can be gotten over.

At the same time, the order that is capable of generating disorder has to
involve an irrational number, a transcendental function, or a nonlinear
operation somewhere... it can be quite simple like PI or the square root of
a number.... I'm afraid we'll lose half the audience if we keep going this
way, but the matter is quite important. The circle was for the ancients the
symbol of perfect order and perfect simplicity, yet it contains implicitly
pi, a non-repeating decimal.... the natural numbers also are a symbol of
perfect order and perfect simplicity, but they cannot so easily be got to
produce chaos. So the circle has, if you will, a higher order of order than
the natural numbers.

I suspect that the primitive elements of the proto-grammars that underlie
human cognition have, if you will, an order of order like that of the
circle. They can be got to produce a wonderful and mysterious chaos that is
not actually random, but the folding of an implicate order.

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Barrett 
>> No, just as human languages all involve words and syllables in
>>spite of the vastly wider range of possibilities afforded by the vocal
>>tract, there is apparently some deep structure underlying human >music
>production, a proto-grammar of meter and scale that can take >a huge
variety
>of forms without obscuring the intelligibility afforded by >this underlying
>basis.
>
>humans like order.  disorder is uncertain and scary.  you have to take a
>chance with it.
>